Amazon.com is the largest and one of the most widely known e-commerce shopping sites on the Web. The company was founded as an online bookstore by Jeff Bezos in 1995. It soon diversified its product lines, adding DVDs, electronics, furniture, and more. Its initial "slow growth" business plan was effective: when the Internet "bubble" burst and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered. Why was the company sued by Barnes & Noble and Walmart in the late 1990s?More...

Composed by Handel, the great master of baroque music, Messiah is one of the most popular choral works in the Western world. Its immense popularity has resulted in the erroneous conception of Handel as primarily a church composer. In truth, the contemplative, English-language oratorio stands apart from the rest of his 32 oratorios, which are dramatically conceived. How did it become tradition for audiences to stand during the performance of Messiah's "Hallelujah" chorus?More...

In the 1930s, Butts, an unemployed architect, invented a game called Lexiko, in which players drew lettered tiles from a pool and then attempted to form words. After unsuccessful attempts to sell the game to board-game makers, Butts sold the rights to entrepreneur James Brunot, who made a few minor adjustments and renamed the game Scrabble. More than 150 million sets have been sold in multiple languages since. How did Butts determine how many tiles of each letter should be included in the game?More...

Quotation of the Day

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Unique among American presidents, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was not only a statesman but a scholar, linguist, writer, philosopher, political theorist, architect, engineer, and farmer. In the US, he is remembered primarily as the author in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence. A birthday commemoration is held each year at Monticello, Jefferson's home in Virginia, as well as at the Jefferson Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC. More...

A new study finds that up to 10% of people could get motion sickness in a self-driving car. “Not enough attention has been paid to this issue,” a researcher says. The hype over self-driving cars has hit a fever pitch. Google is working on one. So are Audi and ...More...

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